Review of "Ophelia's Mom"

Nina Shandler, Ed.D., knows from whence she speaks. She raised
two daughters who are both healthily out of their teens and survived
the complete exposure of her parenting skills and her youngest
daughters' graphic opinion of those skills when she published
a book on the subject at age 17. Sarah Shandler's book Ophelia Speaks,
was written in response to Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia which voiced
the concerns of teenaged women as they struggled with depression,
peer pressure, temptations of alcohol, sex, drugs and other issues
that are both milestones and seemingly insurmountable obstacles
for girls as they move from adolescence to womanhood. Sarah's
mother Nina, a physiologist and family therapist outlines in her
13-page introduction how she went about soliciting information
from some 23,000 mothers of adolescent girls encouraging them
to share their side of the story. She discusses the process, and
the statistics, the truths and the myths in this introduction
and then begins to offer some of her own experiences emphasizing
the difficulties that mothers experience, as they approach menopause
just as their teenaged girls are beginning to blossom.

If this were the case for every mother of a teenaged daughter,
then this book would be akin to an owner's manual, however only
up and until page thirteen. While Nina Schandler has gathered
a cross section of the population and organized their stories
into sections with like stories, her attempt to flow them together
with little introductory paragraphs filled with clinical observations
actually detracts from the overall benefit of the book: listening
to the shared stories of mothers like us. However, when the author
shares her own stories in the role of participant rather than
editor, I found them poignant and enlightening.

I'll be honest; this book is not about mothers like me. I am a
single lesbian raising my daughter in conjunction with my ex -partner.
My daughter is six at this time and I can't really say what will
happen when she reaches puberty, but this book does not represent
me demographically at all. It does not represent women of color
(or at least that wasn't evident from the examples), it doesn't
represent anyone with any consistent religious devotion (save
the fundamentalist woman who showed 'tolerance' for her lesbian
daughter) and not until half way into the book do we see a representation
of mothers with daughters who are anything but 'stunning' and
'perfect', except that they have distanced themselves from their
mothers. We also do not hear about the father's roles until the
last few chapters in any great detail.

This book, as the introduction states, is supposed to be the mother's
voice; the story of adolescent girls puberty and how it blindsides
their mothers. And in fact, that's just what it is. The mother's
side of the story. Perhaps it's my lack of experience as the 'victim'
of this distancing that inspires my craving for the girls point
of view in these situations. These mother's would shake their
heads at me and say 'just you wait until she doesn't want you
anymore!' and they're probably right. But in these stories I don't
see resolution or resignation, I see mother's surviving any way
they can until their daughter's reach seventeen. As a reader I
wanted these women to be imparting wisdom. I wanted them to have
learned from their experiences, but many of them didn't seem to
have understood what had taken place. They often missed how their
own reactions had heightened the anxiety and lengthened the distance
between themselves and their daughters.

What they did teach me is that there's a big hurt coming up for
me in about six years and I should be ready for it. So yes, any
mother of a daughter would benefit from skimming through this
volume. There are things that these women share, that will help
prepare mothers like me, for what lies ahead. However, I'll warn
any prospective reader, that there is some selfish, blind, and
just downright bad parenting described in these pages and I was
honestly astonished at how quiet the author remained throughout
these interviews. I expected more insight into the psychologist's
opinion regarding how these woman fared, how they handled the
situations and perhaps a better comparison of different methods
of approaching the same situation.

This book was inspired by Sarah Schandler's compilation of the
voices of teenaged girls. It would have been better served by
restricting it to the author's insights alone, which when she
was talking about her own experiences, were enlightening, pleasant
to read and honest. She shared with us her feelings about how
she handled that period in her daughter's lives and how wrong
she was on occasion about the nature of their relationship with
her. She also shared the parts where it turned out she'd been
right, and that was quite inspiring. She didn't seem to require
or encourage that same honesty or awareness from the contributors
and therefore the compilation is lacking in continuity and message.

Overall, the content of Ophelia's Mom has value as a glimpse
into the future for mothers of daughters. But, it falls short
of its stated purpose, which is to show women how and why, they
must learn to let go of their daughters -- who will no doubt,
grow up, whether we like it or not. If anything, I can now think
of about fifteen ways I should not react when my daughter begins
rolling her eyes and pretending she doesn't know me in public.

Rose Sennett is the
mother of a six-year-old daughter whom she is raising in conjunction
with her ex-partner in New York City. Rose is a writer, a classical
vocalist, a Jazz enthusiast and by day, a Systems Engineer for
Information Builders, Inc., a private software developer with
corporate offices in New York City.